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Isentia

Eco trends in social media

Can
we really understand the mysterious and random virality of social media? In an
immense sea of content, how do we predict which trends will generate enough
movement to form a wave?

Some trends can be picked ahead of their
time, however the explosiveness of a random tweet, call-to-action or cat video
is almost impossible to pin-point.

While trends will mostly fade back and be
replaced with another, the occasional and rare trend can have legitimate and
measurable impacts on society. A recent example of this is the anti-plastic
straw movement that took off in 2018.

It started with a terribly sad and visceral video
of a straw being removed from the nose of a sea turtle – it’s likely you’ve
seen it yourself. The internet is filled with images and videos relating to the
impacts of pollution and climate change on the wildlife, however this video
happened to stick in the social media sphere long enough to cause a stir.

In the context of environmental upset and
helplessness, the plastic straw became the epitome of our harmful single-use
plastic culture. In the space of a couple of months, plastic straws were
disappearing from venues and public discourse stigmatised their use. Massive
chain restaurants such as McDonalds and Starbucks announced plans to ban the
plastic straw, as well as some cities and countries introducing bans or taxes
on similar single-use products.

While this is ultimately a positive movement
with good intention, rejecting the use of plastic straws is an easy and
short-term relief to an overwhelming frustration with single-use consumer
culture. This year we’ve been seeing similar trends emerge with the rise of
keep-cup popularity and debates over plastic bags in super markets.

These trends may be tokenistic, however, they
are telling of widespread sentiment and signify the public’s desire to be heard
and responded too.

Research First

Why Everything Takes Longer
Than You Expect

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, the Director of the Harvard
University Advanced Leadership Initiative, once said that “the middle of every
successful project looks like a disaster”. I’ve always loved that idea, but the
view from social science tends to be that it’s the
start of projects where the problems lie. When we estimate how long
a project will take, it seems we’re wired to chronically underestimate the time
needed. This is such a common problem that it is known as ‘The Planning
Fallacy’. It’s expressed even better in Hofstadter’s Law. Named after the
cognitive scientist, Douglas Hofstadter, this law states that “it always takes
longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law”.

The important part for our purposes is that
‘always’ part, because we fall into this planning trap over and over again.
It’s not that we can’t see that projects tend to miss deadlines and budgets,
just that we think the next one will work better.

This provides a wonderful lens into one of the most
counteractive findings from psychology – that none of us is much good at
predicting how we’re going to feel in future. Predicting future emotions is
called ‘affective forecasting’ and all the research evidence shows that its
rarely straightforward. The problem isn’t, as the Rolling Stones noted, that we
can’t always get what we want, it’s that we rarely know what we need. This has
real implications for your wellbeing because it shows that while right now you
might think a new house, spouse, or waistline will make you happy, the chances
are they won’t. Or at least not in the way you were hoping.

The gap between what we think we’ll feel when we make
our predictions and what we actually end up feeling is called, imaginatively,
‘the impact bias’. This bias has two parts – intensity and duration. This
describes how achieving our goals doesn’t make us as happy as we expected (the
intensity of the emotion), and how that happiness doesn’t last as long as we
anticipated (the duration of the emotion).

We fail to understand how we’ll feel in future,
because, as
Psychology Today put it,
“we have trouble seeing through the filter of the now”. It’s the same with
predicting how long projects will take. What seems to be at fault here is a
cognitive bias known
as ‘The Optimism Bias’. This describes how we
overestimate the likelihood of positive outcomes and underestimate negative
ones. If you don’t think that sounds like you, it might surprise you to read
that it is “one of the most consistent, prevalent, and robust biases documented
in psychology and behavioural economics”. Given this, it’s no surprise that all
of us at some point will get to enjoy “the whooshing noise” deadlines make as
they go by.

As a result, at the start of every new project we
manage to convince ourselves that, this time, the best-case scenario will be
realised. When we ‘plan’ we tend to focus on the details of the project steps
rather than simply reflecting on how long it took to do something similar
previously. But with projects as with so much in life, thinking about past performances
rather than best cases is usually the smarter bet.

Carl Davidson is the Chief Social Scientist at
Research First

__________________

Discover how to use Behaviour Insights to
‘work smarter not harder’ at 2018 Senior Professionals Event. Senior
Behavioural Strategist, Dan Bennett from Ogilvy Change (UK) will present a
participative seminar designed specifically for senior PR professionals on ‘How
to use Behavioural Insight to solve our biggest challenges’ in Auckland (10
Oct) and Wellington (12 Oct). View full details
here.

__________________

Bibliography

I’ve used the
Kanter quote for years, and it’s all over the internet, but it’s not really
clear to me where it comes from. It might be that the original is actually
“everything feels like a failure when you are in the middle”. If any of you
know the original and the source, please
get in touch.

You can read about Hofstadter’s Law in his wonderful (1980)
Gödel,
Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
, Vintage Books
Edition, p. 152 or find a great summary in Oliver Burkeman’s (2008) “Why
everything takes longer than you think” (
The
Guardian,
August 2nd, 2008)

The best place to start reading about The Optimism
Bias is Tali Sharot’s (2011) “The Optimism Bias”,
Current Biology Volume 21, Issue 23, pages R941-R945. That is where I got the quote
about “one of the most consistent, prevalent, and robust biases documented in
psychology” from.

The line about deadlines whooshing by is, of course, a tribute the
great and often missed Douglas Adams, from
The salmon of doubt: Hitchhiking
the galaxy one last time
. London: Macmillan, 2002.

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